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Zahra. Chehri. 18) Social bookmarking in education
Social bookmarking for education Social bookmarking tools are an emerging educational technology that has been drawing more of educators' attention over the last several years. This technology offers knowledge sharing solutions and a social platform for interactions and discussions. These tools enable users to collaboratively underline, highlight, and annotate an electronic text, in addition to providing a mechanism to write additional comments on the margins of the electronic document.For example, Delicious could be used in a course to provide an inexpensive answer to the question of rising course materials costs. RISAL (Repository of Interactive Social Assets for Learning) is another social bookmarking system used for supporting teaching and learning at the university level. Social bookmarking tools have several purposes in an academic setting including: organizing and categorizing web pages for efficient retrieval; keeping tagged pages accessible from any networked computer; sharing needed or desired resources with other users; accessing tagged pages with RSS feeds, cell phones and PDAs for increased mobility; allowing librarians and instructors the capability to follow students' progress; and giving students another way to collaborate with each other and make collective discoveries. Teaching Social Bookmarking with Diigo Education Social bookmarking in education is a new and exciting opportunity for teachers and students to connect and collaborate online. Using Diigo Educator accounts is one of the best ways to achieve this. · What is Social Bookmarking? There are many potential uses for social bookmarking in education. However, you may be asking yourself just what it is. Social bookmarking is a way to save, store, group, and share Internet bookmarks online. It allows you to have access to your favorite bookmarks on any computer with Internet access, so even if you are away from home, or work, you can still find and use the sites you value most. Social bookmarking sites also give you the option of joining a group of like minded people, following, or being followed by, individuals who collect similar types of bookmarks to your own. Examples of such sites include Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious, and the focus of this article, Diigo. · Why Use Diigo in Education? Diigo lets you do more than just bookmark web pages online. For instance, if you install the Diigo toolbar, or toolbar button, you have the ability to highlight text and pictures in a variety of colors, or add sticky notes to a bookmarked page. With this feature you can annotate web pages with thoughts, ideas or additional information. All these notes are saved for the next time you access the saved bookmark, and anyone else you share the bookmark with, (students or teachers), will also see your annotations. It is a great way to focus attention on a large article. Diigo lets you take screenshots of bookmarked pages to visually remind yourself of the page content, and archive the page so that if the content changes, or is removed, you will always have the original page that you bookmarked. Saved sites can be tagged for easy searching, organized into lists, or presented as a slideshow. Your Diigo bookmarks can be public, or private, and there are numerous options for sharing with individuals, groups or social networking sites like Twitter or Facebook. A recent iPhone App will even allow you and your students to access stored bookmarks on an iPod Touch in the classroom. With the iPhone app you can download bookmarks for offline browsing. So, you really can achieve a lot by using social bookmarking in education. · How Can I Use Diigo With My Class? Diigo's commitment to helping teachers use social bookmarking in education is evident with their educator accounts. If you join Diigo, and apply for a free educator upgrade, you become eligible for some additional features created just for teachers. You can bulk create student accounts, with or without the use of student email addresses. Teachers are often concerned about the safety of their students online, and rightly so. With Diigo Educator accounts, the privacy settings, by default, limit communication to that of classmates and teachers only. Lastly, students in the same class are automatically set up as a group, so all saved bookmarks can instantly be shared with peers. The real bonus of using social bookmarking with your class is the ease that you can work on project based learning tasks. Teachers can share annotated bookmarks with a class to research a given topic. Students can perform their own research, and share a useful website with the class. Bookmarks can be accessed just as easily at home, as at school, and online discussions can be had over the merit of a suggested site, or its usefulness to the class project. Bookmarks can be organized within group to cover several different projects, and the chance to archive for next year's class is a great time saver for teachers. · There is a lot to like about Diigo, as its potential in the classroom is clear to see. There should be no debate about whether or not there should be social bookmarking in education. The opportunity to give your students the opportunity to learn in a safe, collaborative environment such as this, is something that all educators should consider. Key Takeaways · Social bookmarking websites enhance and improve the learning experience by encouraging group collaboration and making organizing and saving web resources''' '''faster and easier for students. · Social bookmarking services offer greater scope for research, integration, and collaboration compared to the more traditional bookmarking applications such as browsers, which offer limited functionality. · Among social bookmarking services, Diigo has features and functions that make it useful for the classroom, giving instructors tools for setting up groups of students, highlighting key information, and commenting. Classroom collaboration is an area that benefits directly from today's Internet experience in that students can develop their potential for learning by becoming more actively involved. Indeed, they can learn to approach and solve problems by collaborating with other students and their teachers. Social bookmarking websites give them opportunities to discover and organize information. While many social bookmarking sites offer some collaboration opportunities, I have found that Diigo (Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff) combines a user-friendly social platform with bookmarking features, making it an effective research, integration, and collaboration tool for use in the classroom. In this article, I compare the benefits of traditional and social bookmarking websites. Then, using Diigo as a focus, I explore the possible uses and benefits of social bookmarking for research and collaboration in the classroom. Traditional Bookmarking Teachers and students routinely use the Internet for archiving, organizing, and sharing information associated with their research and in collaboration with others on projects. Keeping track of and organizing the incalculable website options available is a daunting task. Most commonly, users save a web page's URL with their personal browser's bookmarking feature, like Favorites (in Explorer) or Bookmarks (in Firefox), to revisit it in the future. However, these browser bookmarking systems have not kept up with the changes and growth of the Internet, saving clusters of websites arranged loosely around informational themes. While this method of saving web pages and websites can help a computer user remember and quickly access important sites, there are numerous disadvantages: · Building a list of important bookmarks not only is time-consuming, but the list is only available on the individual user's computer. · Large collections of bookmarks can quickly become unmanageable and disorganized. · Users may not remember why they created a bookmark or what part of the page they were trying to save.1 Social Bookmarking The proliferation of Web 2.0 tools has inspired the development of a number of applications designed to enhance collaborative work. Notable among these are social bookmarking systems. From a social network platform, they serve as an organizational tool to collect and organize a variety of web resources (hyperlinks, documents, podcasts, video files, graphics, etc.).2 Social bookmarking has advantages over the traditional schemes, principally because it relies on a web-based system of classification known as folksonomy. Tags are collaboratively created and managed to annotate and categorize web content. Social bookmarking sites first appeared about 10 years ago, but did not gain wide popularity until the launch of Del.icio.us in 2003. Among the many sites available today, Delicious and Diigo are the two most commonly used in education. One key difference between Delicious and Diigo is annotation. The latter allows users to highlight any part of a web page and attach sticky notes to specific highlights or to a whole page. These annotations can be kept private, shared with a Diigo group, or forwarded as a special link to other individuals or groups for collaborative purposes. Table 1 compares the main features of Diigo, Delicious, and traditional browsers. Social bookmarking is a tool educators can use to store, organize and share bookmarks of websites.The bookmarks or favorites are stored on a Social Bookmarking site rather than on your local machine. As a teacher, this tool can be very beneficial in organizing websites for use with students. Social Bookmarking sites will also allow you to share your bookmarked or favorites sites with colleagues. · List websites for classroom use · Access bookmark/favorites from any computer with an Internet connection · Share sites with colleagues · Create a list of homework help sites that students can access from home or school · Create a list of safe research sites for students · Organize your bookmarks/favorites by topic · Show students how to use Social Bookmarking sites to store their own sites Social Bookmarking Comparison Chart * Between Diigo and Delicious. Diigo permits adding new bookmarks to a Delicious library. ** Teachers with an educator account can create a private group for students. By default, student profiles are private. As Table 1 shows, Diigo has more features than Delicious or browsers, enabling users to tag, organize, manage, and share information they discover online.4 Diigo's Free and Education Basic plans are the most popular. For the classroom, Diigo's features make it easy to: · Research, collect, and organize bookmarks, highlights, notes, screenshots, pictures, etc. · Gain access anywhere and share with the most popular browsers · Get app applications for Android, iPhone, and iPad · Collaborate with students, teachers, and groups Research If you find a key paragraph about the topic your students are researching, you can highlight it and then bookmark the page. As long as you're logged into Diigo, every time you visit that page, the paragraph will be highlighted. Various highlighting options are available. Individual students can use Diigo to organize bookmarks on research topics, while groups can collaborate, share, and discuss information by annotating key websites. For instance, bookmarks that have been tagged as "science" or "current events" can be shared with other students involved in the same project. In fact, social bookmarking simplifies the distribution of reference lists, bibliographies, papers, and other resources. In doing research or other tasks using Diigo, students can: · Highlight text and pictures in a variety of colors and add sticky notes to a bookmarked page · Bookmark important websites and access them from school or home and share them with other students · Categorize websites with titles, notes, keyword tags, lists, and groups · Save a screenshot of a website or capture and save an image · View any annotations made by other students (of the same group) on another website · Save relevant websites to lists in their Diigo student accounts · Comment on other students' bookmarks Access and App Support Diigo allows students and teachers to access saved web pages remotely from any computer that has access to the Internet, since the information isn't stored on a single computer. It also supports popular browsers, including Google Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer, and apps for Android, iPhone, and iPad. Collaboration Used across the curriculum, Diigo can help students develop and improve skills in communication, organization, and classification. As a collaborative tool, it allows teachers and students to save websites into a public or private library, highlight information of a web page, and attach sticky notes to highlight as little or as much of a web page as needed. For instance, it is simple for the teacher of a current issues class to identify and share news articles, video, blogs, podcasts, etc., from the Internet with students using Diigo. Students themselves can also identify themes and share them in a class group. In allowing teachers to create and manage student accounts, Diigo supports a full range of interactions between student, group, and teacher. Additional educational features: · Allow teachers to highlight important information within text and images · Make it possible to write comments directly on web pages · Help organize thematically linked web pages and websites · Support collaboration and resource sharing · Facilitate online discussion Diigo's student accounts can be kept either private (with no e-mail addresses) or grouped to make sharing resources simpler. Accounts make it easy to organize research and collaboration through the use of bookmarks and tags. Annotating tools include highlighting, floating sticky notes, and comment options. Moreover, teachers can keep individual student work organized and provide both individual and group feedback. User groups also facilitate collaboration by allowing individuals and groups with common research interests to come together. By going to My Network, users can join groups or create groups linking them to other people with common interests and follow other groups' news feeds or e-mails. Tutorials Diigo has a number of help tutorials both on its website and elsewhere online. However, the following example tutorials highlight some of Diigo's main features. Diigo Toolbar The Diigo toolbar is a browser add-on extension that gives the user instant access to the social bookmarking service's features . Diigo Functions Bookmarking allows users to bookmark a web page by entering its URL, title, and tag . Some options include the privacy setting, public versus private; unchecked means public. Checking the Unread box marks the page for later reading. (The Read later feature also saves pages for later.)